Monthly Archives: October 2014

I’m starting the Wednesday pontifications with a subseries I’ll call Greater Minds. I’ll be taking various articles, podcasts or anything else that looks relevant to writing, and discussing what I’ve learned from them. The discussion is not intended to summarise…

Marnie felt words boiling inside her, but they were the kind that made sense. Logical, grammatical sense. Not the kind of sense Prof understood. She took a deep breath and studied Prof’s face. In his mind, the kindness in his…

When I started this blog, I’d planned a series of posts giving my thoughts on the life cycle of a short story. The last post concluded that series so I’ve indexed them here. Meanwhile, I plan to keep the blog…

It may take a while, but if the story is good and you keep pushing it out there, someone is going to accept it. The second happiest moment in the life cycle of a manuscript is when the acceptance arrives.…

Submission has got a lot easier since most markets moved from hardcopy to electronic submissions. Their guidelines can be relied on to explain the process, but there are still a few points of mechanics worth being aware of. Formatting the…

Planning, writing and improving a story is a labour of love. Getting it published is anything but. It takes time, and a story can expect to get a lot of rejections before someone takes it on. It’s an exercise in…

Being critiqued hurts. There’s no way around it. You’ve lavished time and love on your story, and you’re about to be told everything that’s wrong with it. Someone’s probably told you you’ll need a thick skin. As if that’s helpful.…

Let’s consider one of the most famous first sentences in English literature: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch…

I’ve mentioned the importance of the story opening often enough that you’re probably beginning to wonder why I left it until now to describe. The reason is that the clearer an idea you have of what the rest of the…